Elizabethan Tragedy Analysis

Drama is the name of the sum-total of actions – actions which issue from characters. And if the characters are not as Dr. Johnson said, “Phantoms that strut upon the stage”, but do look like human beings (by their speech and action, that is, what in psychology is called, ‘behavior’), the critic relates one action to another, one speech to another in order to form the total personality. If the characters have roundness and complexity we try to see them not only from the outside (i.e. action) but also from the inside (i.e. speech, which reveals the conscious as well as the unconscious mental state). But for Stoll there is no logical connection between two mental states, as he says “a character does not secrete its own poison but is inoculated

For example, Muriel Bradbrook in her two books – Elizabethan Stage Conditions (1932) and “Themes and Conventions of Elizabethan Tragedy” (1935) – demonstrates that Shakespeare and his great contemporaries transformed the limitations of convention into positive virtues. Logan Pearsall Smith in his book “On Reading Shakespeare”(1938) twitted Stoll as “the leader of the American and hardest-boiled schools of Shakespeare criticism.” But in spite of these writers the anti-character wave had reached its acme. Bradley’s name had become an anathema. Professor L.C. Knights severely criticized Smith for having talked about character in Shakespeare’s plays. He wrote: “And if we wish for higher authority we have only to turn to the book by Mr. Logan Pearsall Smith, On Reading Shakespeare, Mr. Smith demands respect as the author of ‘Words and Idioms’, in which he showed the kind of interest in language needed for the critical approach to Shakespeare. But there is nothing of that interest in the present essay. Here Shakespeare is praised because he provides ‘the illusion of reality,’ because he puts ‘living people’ upon the stage, because he creates characters who are ‘independent of the work in which they appear… and when the curtain falls they go on living in our imaginations and remain as real to us our familiar friends.” [Knights L